Who By Fire
by Stephensmat
Summary: The first time they spoke, Fisk had told The Man in the Mask that they weren't so different. What Matt Murdock never knew, was how true that was. Spoilers for the first season of Daredevil on Netflix, which was the story of two men that both loved their neighborhood more than made sense.


**AN**: _Okay, so here it is. Netflix's Daredevil wasn't just an origin story for Daredevil. It was an origin story for Kingpin too. The two of them, in my humble opinion, were like a coin flipping over and over. This was me, trying to express the way I saw that. Let me know how close I came to getting it right?_

* * *

After the New York Invasion, the fear was thick. But stronger than fear was the despair. Humans had been replaced as masters of the world. The footage played over and over. Matt could still smell the scorch marks. Police, National Guard... Nothing more than cinders when The Mighty had their rumble, far above their heads.

Matt Murdock could tell, more than most. People had lost faith in people. The idea that a person could make a difference to anything had been replaced with apathy. If you didn't have a magic hammer, or a combat suit, or radioactive blood, then nobody expected you to achieve anything. Especially not in the Kitchen.

"Murdock's go the distance." His father had drummed that lesson into him since the cradle. "You don't quit until the Big Man rings the bell."

So when the Kitchen retreated into their hiding places like rats into their nests, Matt Murdock dared to keep going. Even bleeding in a hallway, mortal and broken, he kept getting up for more.

Battlin' Jack had gotten back up when he shouldn't have, because he wanted a life his son could be proud of. Matt kept getting up because nobody else was going to, and he wanted the whole Kitchen to do the same.

* * *

Wilson Fisk had lived like a rat in a nest for most of his early life. They called it a 'depressed area' but he knew what it was. It was a place where people were put when they didn't have enough money, or enough talent to be noticed. The Kitchen was where you went when the rest of the world didn't want to know you.

Wilson actually liked that about Hell's Kitchen. The people there had pride enough that nobody could talk trash about their little world but them. Everyone always talked tough about how they'd make something of themselves. Men like Battlin' Jack had the respect of everyone who lived within a twenty block radius, but nobody outside the Kitchen cared. It was understood that if you could make it in New York, you could make it anywhere. In Hell's Kitchen, you didn't even try for that much. If you could _survive _there, you were bulletproof. Little old ladies in crumbling HK apartments were tougher than Brooklyn gang-bangers and Wall Street tycoons put together.

Then The Invasion happened, and nobody in the Kitchen even bothered to take pride in their own defiance. They scurried, afraid to look up at the sky, afraid to look up at the skyline.

"Hit a man once, and he'll hit you right back. Hit him so many times he can't remember his own name, and he'll cower whenever he sees you." Wilson's father had drummed that lesson into him since the cradle. The Kitchen had been hit harder than anywhere else in the Boroughs. But they'd only been hit once. It was time to get back up and start hitting back. It was time to get the pride back.

Wilson's father had punched and lied and cheated, to put himself above his whole world, and swap cake for caviar, and peeling wallpaper for polished marble. Wilson had gone a hundred times further to take his whole world up several rungs with him, and swap slums for towers and depression for industry.

* * *

The first time Murdock had stopped a crime, he did it for a little girl he'd never met. He never saw what was happening to her, of course. He hadn't really seen anything since he was a boy. But he could hear the girl crying every night when the door to her room opened.

Anybody who watched that sort of thing was a criminal. Matt could hear it perfectly. He could _smell _it happening, even from so far away.

Matt knew intimately the way people turned their eyes away from things that didn't concern them. Nobody wanted to help themselves to a barrel full of shame and pain and trouble if they could avoid it. They did it for a frightened girl, they did it to a blind orphan boy.

He didn't want to be a warrior. Stick, the one that the nuns had found to help him adapt to a normal life, had been a Drill Sargent. His father, the professional boxer, had insisted he be a pacifist. Matt had studied all sorts of ways to fight for order and justice. Stick had taught him combat. The nuns had taught him routine and mercy. His guilt had driven his education in many directions. Eventually, he'd chosen law because it meant defending people without needing to get your knuckles dirty. His father would have approved.

But he could hear the little girl praying, out loud, every night. She was asking for a guardian angel to take her away from her home.

The girl didn't need a lawyer. And she didn't need a guardian angel, full of love and peace and good works.

She needed a Guardian Devil.

Matt wondered if he had done it for himself. If he'd done it, just so that he wouldn't have to listen to it any more. He wondered if he'd done it because he hated people who did things like that, and wanted an excuse to beat them to death and get away with it. But he pulled the mask on, and that night, the little girl looked up to God, and said thank you.

Matt slept very well for the first time since he was a kid.

* * *

The first time Fisk stopped a crime, it was to protect the most important girl in his life.

He never watched when his mother was struck. He never saw it. but he could hear it perfectly. The sweat, the fear, even the blood. He could smell it happening.

He knew the neighbors could hear this happening. He could tell by the way their eyes flicked straight past him when they saw him. They knew what happened in his father's home, and they turned their eyes away. None of them would help themselves to trouble if they could avoid it.

But he could hear his mother moaning, deep in her aching bones. At night, he would come to her in secret with bandages and she would send him away. She didn't want him to see her broken. His mother didn't need a boy. She needed a man. But the man she had was the one that hurt her. So Wilson Fisk had stepped up, suddenly knowing what he wanted to be. Deep down, he wondered if he'd have the nerve if his father's back wasn't turned.

But he'd picked up the hammer, and his mother had made sure they got away with it.

He'd explored several ways to make the wrong things right. There were good people, offering hope. Self-Help, Twelve Steps, seeking divine guidance... They all had their place. Along the way, he'd met plenty of people on the other side of the coin. People who needed Twelve Step programs because they were junkies. People who were only out for profit, even if they acted like they cared.

Wilson had searched all the ways to make the unjust pay fairly, and the innocent to be protected. He wasn't a fool. The first time he'd protected someone, it had been fatal to his own family. Down in the Kitchen, there was no Right and Wrong, but he didn't want to be a bad guy. It was a question of price. The price for saving his mother had been the life of someone he despised. What would the price for saving a city be?

Wilson wondered what his father would make of the tale of the Good Samaritan. Wilson had decided that the moral of the story didn't go far enough.

The Man in the Mask was a Good Samaritan. He would help the victim, no matter how much punishment he took; and Wilson respected that greatly. But Wilson knew that wasn't enough. Helping the victim would save a life, but hunting down those of ill-intent and making them _beg _would save everyone who walked that road alone.

* * *

Vanessa did not reject Wilson Fisk. She validated him.

She hated violence. She knew that it would be part of her life if she was with him, but she chose to stay. She looked at something darker than she was, and she refused to blink. In fact, she put herself into it, because he'd bared his soul and told long hidden secrets and asked her to tell him, if he was a monster.

And she had taken him to bed, nothing but love and compassion. It was one of the best night's sleep he'd had in ages.

It was the final confirmation that Wilson needed. Because Vanessa _was _the City to him. She was full of beauty and unfulfilled potential. An Art Gallery in Hell's Kitchen? She'd never had a chance at success or fortune or fame, but she loved beauty too much, and loved her home too much to take the paintings anywhere else. He knew the Russians ran protection rackets. She would have had to pay. Even if it cost her, she'd take the risk, because she had the desire to elevate something that the whole world had written off.

Vanessa offered him love, and forgiveness, and gratitude. All the things he hoped the city would offer. Vanessa _was_ the Kitchen to him; and in her eyes, he was doing right.

Even if it meant doing bad.

* * *

Claire did not reject Matthew Murdock. She hated violence, but she was touched by it more than most. Matt could smell the aftershave of violence on her. She was a trauma nurse in Hell's Kitchen after all. Matt hated hospitals. The perfume of blood and medicine and solvents and death was thick in the walls, and she picked it up the way people always did when they walked though such places.

When Matt last went to a hospital, he could hear a hundred hearts keeping time with the monitors. He could hear hundreds of hearts by their bedsides, waiting to see if their loves would stand up, or go still and quiet.

But Claire... She was nothing but life. Her fingertips held none of the unhealthy smell of festering wounds, but the scrubbed clean smell of new skin growing to make pain and injury fade. She worked in every part of the clinic, and sometimes she would come home smelling of coffee, and sometimes she'd have that unmistakable, almost holy scent of a newborn baby; life in its most innocent form.

Matt would come to her at night, bleeding and battered, at the end of his strength. She never sent him away, though he could sense how exhausted she was. Two in the morning, after working a double shift, she rolled up her sleeves again, just for him. She would pour her compassion into him through gentle, lingering touches, and Matt felt his spirit grow strong again. She liked that he came to her. She never sent him away, no matter how broken he was.

Claire gave him what the Kitchen offered. Defiance. Her spirit and will was unbreakable. Just feeling her fingertips explore his newest scars made her tender strength flow back into his battered body, and he'd make himself get back up again. Claire was nothing but life. And she believed he was a good man, or at least, had the potential to be better than the world thought him to be.

Claire did not reject the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. She validated him.

Claire had told him stories of the people he'd helped. People he'd never met, who weren't scurrying back into their fearful places any more, because even without a magic hammer or a combat suit, or radioactive blood, someone was standing up and going the distance.

He'd almost laughed when he's learned her surname was Temple. His father had told him to treat a woman like a Queen, and her body like a temple. Foggy had learned this, after a night of drinking and flirting with some co-eds, and made the joke that he would worship at one every chance he got. Stick had warned him about attachments, and romantic, intimate ones more than any other. Catholic tradition had tainted every woman since Eve with the lure of temptation and original sin; but Matt didn't crave just her body. He craved her compassion. Because Claire would never care for a monster.

Matt could turn Claire away, as long as he knew she'd still thought him worthy. As long as she had faith in her Guardian Devil, she'd keep patching the holes and letting him drink from her limitless reservoir of strength and spirit.

But The City demanded his full attention, and he did what he always known he'd do. The Kitchen came first.

And when all the rest had been broken or left behind, when the cops had been proven inadequate...

It had finally come, as Matt knew it would. Just him, and Fisk. When the good were slain, and the evil were broken and escape was impossible, only Matt had dared to keep going. Only The Devil of Hell's Kitchen had dared to keep moving. Murdock's went the distance.

The Kitchen had turned out a Devil.

* * *

Wilson Fisk could send Vanessa away, as long as she took his ring with her, and he knew she was safe. She'd begged him to go with her, and never spoke a word against him, even as the Law came swarming in. The City demanded his full attention... And he'd failed to give it, staying by her bedside. Which was why he was in chains, and Vanessa was a world away.

He stared at the bare wall, with the familiar mottled pattern. Doing good by doing wrong had brought him Vanessa, and kept her safe. It was enough. For now. But there was a lot further to go.

Doing good by being good was less than useless. Doing good by doing wrong was a start, but it wasn't enough, and finally, Fisk realized what his father had _really _taught him. People who lost everything in their mad dash for profit and power and revenge... simply hadn't gone far enough. If seeking power made you a criminal, then actually _having _it made you a god. And if you weren't a god, then you simply didn't have _enough _power. Fisk's problem wasn't that he'd gone too far. It was that he hadn't gone far enough.

The Kitchen had forged a King.

* * *

**_AN: Read and Review_**


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